About three years ago, we integrated tldraw into BigBlueButton as our whiteboard. It’s been an excellent upgrade over our old, simple whiteboard — tldraw is a fantastic project.
I'm also the CEO of Blindside Networks, the commercial company behind BigBlueButton. We have growing by the traditional open source business model: we offer hosting, engineering services for acceleration of features, and support contracts.
I understand the motive behind tldraw's change of license. Open source projects often get asked two contradictory questions: 1. Can I use your work for free? 2. Can you guarantee that you’ll be around in 5 years?
You can’t answer (1) without a solid plan for (2). Licensing changes are one way projects try to answer both of these questions.
We are no stranger to license changes, we recently rewrote the entire back-end of BigBlueButton and moved away from mongoDB to PostgreSQL + Hasura.
For us, moving to tldraw 4.0 would mean:
- As Blindside (the company): buying a commercial license — that’s straightforward as we are also a commercial company. - As BigBlueButton (the open source project): it would require every organization running BigBlueButton to obtain its own license key to tldraw.
There are pros and cons here. We want a world-class whiteboard in tldraw based on a sustainable open source project, but we also want to keep BigBlueButton’s community deployment model simple.
Curious how others in the HN community have handled integrating source-available components into open source projects. How do you balance sustainability with accessibility?
As far as working with source available components, suggestion one is to look for others int he community that you can cooperate with to maintain a fork, and option two, if you really can't get the community to support a fork, is to make it a plugin/optional component, preferably with an API so that other solutions can be integrated as options, or at least a fallback to the old version that was open source.
I know this is not relevant to the thread, but could I pick your brain on this model? I'm looking at launching a product soon and I've been struggling with how I might monetize it in a sane manner that works for customers and for the business.
At this point tldraw v4 seems to offers no significant improvements over v3, which does everything I want from a whiteboard. I think most people who can live with the previous watermark will just stick with v3 permanently.
I like tldraw as a software but I used to see tldraw having multiple pages in the same canvas and that had helped me tremendously in the past which It seems is now a sign up feature...
I hope excalidraw can catch up too. The more options and the more truly foss options, the better...
Excalidraw was already really established when I started tldraw, yeah. I was a contributor (the app uses my ink library perfect-freehand!) and still love the project. Excalidraw has done really well with their SaaS app Excalidraw+. I still think the bigger long term need / opportunity is for an SDK product, given that whiteboarding is becoming more of a commodity feature, like kanban boards or maps.
If you charge by MAU, that’s the Unity licensing debacle all over again. If you charge by seat actively coding with tldraw - that might just be one seat at a massive funded company. If you offer monthly plans, that’s more BD/account management overhead to prevent churn.
But how do you keep the product usable by a broad community of hobbyists who still may want to commercialize to cover their costs and risks? Not everything can be bring-your-own-token, but if you’re merchant of record, you’re doing so as a commercial entity.
And on the monthly point - “hey boss I made a thing but you’ll have to allocate $6k upfront” is very different from “hey boss I made a thing and we can pay monthly until we validate the ROI.” (And someone might be wearing both hats!)
At minimum, a well-fleshed-out “pre-funding sub-X-revenue startup” program would go a long way towards continuing to build community confidence. Those are good leads to be getting, too!
- for hobby projects: at what moment do you go from hobby to commercial license (and need $6k in cash)?
- for new businesses: you now either have a 90-day window to find product-market fit, or assume you'll have to burn $6k in the event of failure?
I greatly appreciate tldraw and think the licensing changes are completely reasonable. The team is highly responsive on Discord, and looking forward to the company nailing down the nuances of pricing out this specific business model.
Pricing is difficult as it is, open source pricing double so, open source canvas library pricing has got to be one helluva hard problem to solve.
I would like to see more improvements to the sync portion, specifically more granular authorization controls.
Two of the starter kits we released today are more flowcharty. It’s been possible to make this kind of thing with tldraw for about 18 months, since we made our bindings API, and a few teams have built graph UIs on tldraw already, but I wouldn’t say it’s an easy path. Hopefully these starter kits will make it easier to uh start.
"The OSS* Playbook: Turning Free Users into Engineers and back into Paying Users"
This now sounds like the best way to scale adoption heading into 2026.
Sidenote: Payload spending years setting themselves up for a Vercel acquisition only to be acquired by Figma is still my surprise OSS of the year.
Glad I only just started using tldraw weeks ago, time to move away.
IMO A 100-day trial is too short to try it.
I would more likely to use tldraw if it had a monthly fee even at $100-$300/mo.
But $6K a year and getting only community support is a huge risk for some SMEs.
I expect we’ll do extended trial licenses for teams that are serious but just getting started, or are pre-revenue pre-funding; and there’s a hobby license for non-commercial projects. Pricing… never ends.
There is a big difference between how startups buy and how enterprises buy, but it seems you’re treating them as equal in everything except budget.
Anyway, easy for me to say that, I have no stake. You know your customers… but as sales-aware observer, it seems very counterintuitive to make low budget people go through a sales process.